Driving Transformational Change for Employer Engagement
The University of Salford recently held a conference to showcase their work in Employer Engagement. The University has produced a model by identifying barriers to employer engagement which they have developed into enablers. These include Communications and Marketing, Costing, Quality Assurance and Staff Development.
In addition to these, as part of an enabler ‘IT Systems and CRM’, the University has recently implemented a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Prior to implementation their CRM processes often resulted in fragmented engagement, and there were no standard processes which led to a large number of standalone spreadsheets and databases. To overcome these issues, the University chose Agresso as their software solution. The university looked initially to use their own in-house IT department to implement the CRM system, but decided that they did not have the resources to do so and took the decision to use technical expertise from Agresso in the form of a full-time secondment of an Agresso consultant to the University.
This approach has resulted in a two way process of sharing knowledge. The university has learned a great deal about the system from Agresso while the Agresso Consultant seconded, as an employee of the University, has learned a lot about how the institution operates.
The scope for the system was to manage business relationships, record and progress leads and opportunities, administer non credit-bearing CPD courses and to integrate the CRM system with their Agresso Business World finance system. The commitment of the Vice Chancellor has been an important driver for the success of the system and has resulted in buy in across faculties. The system also includes scope for capturing impact statements for use in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and will be used for funding bids, KTPs and essentially everything other than credit bearing students.
There are currently 80 cross faculty users, with the intention to increase this to 120 by Spring 2010. In recognition of the work carried out so far, the JISC Business and Community Engagement programme has recently funded a project to allow the University to carry out further development of their CRM system and processes and to undertake dissemination of their activities.
Find out more about Employer Engagement at the University of Salford
Comments
Leave a Reply